CakePHP 2 and launchd on Mac OS X 10.6

To run i.e. maintenance jobs on a regular basis CakePHP provides the availability to write shells which should then be called by cron. Yet on recent Mac OS systems, cron is not the way to go anymore. Instead, there’s “launchd”. I want to show how to use launchd to run a custom shell on a regular time interval.

The shell

The shell itself can be any shell you want and/or have already written. For details on this refer to the cake book, section Creating a Shell.

The command to run the script

In the cakebook in a section close to the one linked above, the writers propose a short shell script which makes sure the paths are set right – however, we don’t need that on our shiny Mac OS systems. Instead, we just call the shell directly using the provided “cake” program: /path/to/your/cake/app/Console/cake yourshell

The launchd stuff

Launchd wants us to create a .plist file with informations about the program we want to run, when we want to run it and so on. I’ve posted an example plist file here, because the bakery doesn’t allow me to post code here…

Since we can give a working directory (in the WorkingDirectory key), we don’t need to use the cakeshell.sh as proposed in the book.

In the StartInterval key we give the time interval after which the program execution should repeat.

To have everything running on boot, save this file to /Library/LaunchDaemons/ – this seems to be an appropriate place since we programmed some sort of server daemon here. It’s probably a good idea to give the file the same name as you label it in the plist file (only that you add .plist as ending…). Alternatively you can also save the file somewhere else and manually load it by calling launchctl load /path/to/your/com.foo.bar.plist, but you’ll have to repeat that after each reboot to have it constantly running.

Feel free to post any questions in the comments, although I probably won’t be able to answer many of them since I’m certainly not an expert on any of those areas! :-)